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Help: Is my card bad, or my CPU is bottlenecking?

Hi guys, I decided to buy a used ASUS Strix GTX 1080Ti OC card at a discounted price. The guy that sold it to me said that it was used only for a day and it never was used but for a project he connected 6 projectors and stored to never be used again (I think he used 2, since I saw another publication of his with the same card.).

I received the card and installed afterwards. I began to make some tests with it (Metro Last Light Benchmark, 2715 x 1527 because for some reason 1440p is not present.) and the results... I'm not so convinced that the card is what he claimed it was.

I tried to overclocking with +70 to the main clock and +200 on Mem Clock, and test with Unigine Heaven, but it crashes on windowed mode, so I tried Metro LL Benchmark. It didn't crashed, fortunately, but still I'm not so sure of the results.

I'm copy-pasting my results (3 runs) and posting the graphs. Mostly, the help I ask is if someone could tell that the results are consistent with my rig setup.

Rig:

For some reason the RAM is not showing the right frequency, it is overclocked at 2933 @ 18-20-20-39

The Following User Says Thank You to Jon Gerow For This Useful Post:

Have you done any runs without overclocking? A 2Ghz core clock on a Pascal card is pretty high, the normal boost clock of that card is 1708 MHz.

Have you tried running the Metro benchmark without any overclocking? Have you tried any other benchmarks?

With that said, Metro is a very sporadic benchmark and has been known to go high and drop low pretty hard depending on the system configuration. It's not known for consistency among systems but your results are pretty close to KitGuru's.

Have you done any runs without overclocking? A 2Ghz core clock on a Pascal card is pretty high, the normal boost clock of that card is 1708 MHz.

Have you tried running the Metro benchmark without any overclocking? Have you tried any other benchmarks?

With that said, Metro is a very sporadic benchmark and has been known to go high and drop low pretty hard depending on the system configuration. It's not known for consistency among systems but your results are pretty close to KitGuru's.

Oveclocked, tried Unigine Heaven, but it crashed sometimes. As not overclocked, yes I did, but with Physx activated so I made a re-run, without Physx.

Heaven & Valley have oddly low minimum FPS but Superposition looks to be on target (comparison for you).

I think you have something in your system that is causing some kind of hitching. Perhaps try loading your benchmarks onto a different drive. If they are on an HDD then there might be something wrong with that drive, if it's an SSD monitor it's usage in task manager and see if it has any random spikes while the benchmark is running.

I tried a run with mostly all background stuff closed, and windowed mode. Got worse results than last time, and at least didn't say too much activity, but a lot of writing spikes on my SSD (Where the unigine is installed.).

My SSD is a WD Green SATA.

And I don't have a spare SSD. :C I would need to buy one new and install everything to check if it is my SSD.

After one BSOD while watching a Youtube video and constant crashing on my games, I decided to look under the hood of the card and, as a last resort, flashing the VBIOS.

TL;DR: Check the image at the end, it seems the FPS are better, now I have yet to test on games.

But yeah, at first my PC began to crash while playing games, at first I dismissed the first crashes because it was Battlefield 1 and the PC crashed very often inside that game (With the old Sandy Bridge Core i5, the old GTX 970 and with my new Ryzen build with the old GTX 970.) in the menus, so I thought it was the game in the end. Suddenly, a game not so demanding, and one I didn't had any troubles before, began to crash constantly, and when the BSOD happened when I was watching an eFFing youtube video, that's when I said "Screw this! I'm gonna look under the hood and flash VBIOS.".

So, I opened the card, cleaned the old TIM and realize that, yes, it was a GTX 1080Ti, so WTF was happening? I cleaned again, added new TIM and closed the card.

Yeah, I need to replace that thermal pad, Which one would you recommend? I was thinking Thermal Grizzly Minus Pad 8, but I read somewhere else that you also need to be careful about the pad's thickness.

Also, the card seems not to have had any heavy workload by the look on the PCB. However, the seller was right about the amount of dust on it due to storage. At least he was honest about it.

Now, after looking at the hardware, I made my move today and flashed the BIOS. After reading on Overclockers and everywhere else I could, I began the process and... NVidia released new drivers, which was quite unexpected, but necesary after flashing my BIOS. Two restarts later, a Heaven Benchmarking later and...

Huh, interesting results, the Min went up, while Max and AVG were kinda low, but within spec. I'm gonna play some games and see how this little bashing on my head ends up. I just want to play games in peace and no crashes. T-T